My cousin moved there as an adult and had a litter of kids with some flappy-headed Canadian. (poor kids, some look to have lost the genetic flappy-head contest).

She says some things are as easy as they would be in the US at a Dr or Dentist visit, most things in fact,

but for teeth if something is at an orthodontist level it's a pain in the ass to get anything done in a timely manner, and when it comes to Doctor visits if you want to ask for something to further confirm a diagnosis like an xray or CAT/MRI the Doc may not always agree.

There has to be a middle ground between medicare getting fleeced by insurance companies and health providers and having the state take over the entire industry and bog the hospitals down with (additional) bureaucracy and cold logic purely cost-based medical decisions.

Hopefully we'll find that happy medium here with a bit of legislative evolution.

I've often found that most doctors go very much by-the-book, so if you have some sort of problem that their book says shouldn't be there, as far as they're concerned, it's NOT there. Sounds like that's what happened in this case.

The Canadian government is failing the Canadian aboriginal population. That this guy walked around with a knife in his back for three years and was brushed aside by the healthcare bureaucracy is just another example of this.

In the US we still would have left the knife blade in him, we just would have charged him $5000 for it.

@Murphymurphy there are systems where you have a state health care system that takes care of most folks, but if you've got the cash you can also go to a private hospital. AFAIR, that's what England has - my grandfather had most of his care covered by the National 'Elf, but when he wanted his cataracts worked on, and didn't feel like waiting he just went to a private hospital.

AverageAmericanGuy:The Canadian government is failing the Canadian aboriginal population. That this guy walked around with a knife in his back for three years and was brushed aside by the healthcare bureaucracy is just another example of this.

I normally defend my country from all US based criticism of our health system, but this is pretty god damn accurate. I haven't read the details because TFA wouldn't load on my tablet, but I bet even if this guy showed up at a doctor or ER complaining, he'd have been labeled as a drunken Indian seeking opiates.

My cousin moved there as an adult and had a litter of kids with some flappy-headed Canadian. (poor kids, some look to have lost the genetic flappy-head contest).

She says some things are as easy as they would be in the US at a Dr or Dentist visit, most things in fact,

but for teeth if something is at an orthodontist level it's a pain in the ass to get anything done in a timely manner, and when it comes to Doctor visits if you want to ask for something to further confirm a diagnosis like an xray or CAT/MRI the Doc may not always agree.

Want to know how I know that you are a liar or at least very poorly informed? Dental work isn't covered. It's as capitalist as american healthcare. As for doctors not agreeing and giving you MRIs CAT scans or X-rays just because you want them, well yeah that is sort of the point isn't it? We only have so many machines and they belong to everyone. You don't get to use one just because you just think you should. With the amount of misinformation out in the public about healthcare if we allowed everyone to just ask for scans legitimate patients would be left waiting and suffer as a result. The reality is that a higher percentage of Canadians are happy with their healthcare outcomes than Americans.

There has to be a middle ground between medicare getting fleeced by insurance companies and health providers and having the state take over the entire industry and bog the hospitals down with (additional) bureaucracy and cold logic purely cost-based medical decisions.

Do you honestly think that for profit healthcare isn't doing the same exact thing? If so I have a bridge to sell you.

Hopefully we'll find that happy medium here with a bit of legislative evolution.

You don't need to. The rest of the world has figured out a superior system. I have no doubt that if Americans had a completely socialist healthcare system that it would be one of the best if not the best in the world. You have technology, knowledge, and most importantly cash to leverage towards this goal that far outstrips most other developed nations.

Esn:I've often found that most doctors go very much by-the-book, so if you have some sort of problem that their book says shouldn't be there, as far as they're concerned, it's NOT there. Sounds like that's what happened in this case.

/ Hospital worker: Well according to these records, you where actualy born on a Tuesday.Solomon Grundy: [disapointed grunt]Hospital worker: It also says your last name is actualy Grusedy.Solomon Grundy: [Happy grunt]

sent home after not being able to stand the pain 30 some years ago, my friend still finds pieces of gravel in his bed in the morning 2 or 3 times a year left over from the motorcycle accident and the ER's Humanitarian, Cleaning With A Stainless Steel Brush.

He was hit by a golf ball and taken right off his bike. No helmet. He went down so hard I thought he'd had a stroke. Landed on his back and slid to a stop from 45-50 mph. Denim jacket. He was kinda whiney for a while.

Last month, I had an itch right in the middle of my back where, because of a gimpy shoulder,I could not contort my arm enough to reach. It was one of those deep-down-under-the-skin-make-you-twitch kind of itches.I only needed an extra 2 - 3 inches of reach to be able to getat it so I grabbed the nearest thing to use as an extension.

The "nearest thing" happened to be a sharpened pencil.

So as I go to scratch the itch with the point of the pencil, I happened to twitch from the abovementioned itch and it drove the point of the pencil about 1/4" into my back. Thankfully it didnot break off with the point still in my back.

This is not the first time I have injured myself with a pencil.

When I was a kid, I had a bookbag that had pockets on the outside for pencils. At the end ofthe school day, I packed my stuff in my bookbag, slipped a couple of pencils into the outerpocket - points up! - for homework later and started to walk home.

So there I am, walking and chatting with my friends, bookbag swinging back and forth merrilybeside me.

I get about halfway home and this boy comes up behind me and says "Do you know that youhave a pencil sticking out of your knee?"

I looked down and behind me and sure enough, a pencil was sticking out of the back of myknee, gently bobbing with each step I took.

I pulled it out, put it back in the bag, switch the bag to my other hand and kept walking. Notfifteen minutes go by before the same damn thing happens to the OTHER knee.

Unfortunately the point broke off on that one, so I still have graphite floating around behindmy knee somewhere.

Marcintosh:sent home after not being able to stand the pain 30 some years ago, my friend still finds pieces of gravel in his bed in the morning 2 or 3 times a year left over from the motorcycle accident and the ER's Humanitarian, Cleaning With A Stainless Steel Brush.

He was hit by a golf ball and taken right off his bike. No helmet. He went down so hard I thought he'd had a stroke. Landed on his back and slid to a stop from 45-50 mph. Denim jacket. He was kinda whiney for a while.

Ew. Embedded gravel sucks.

When I was 15 or 16, my cousins and I were riding our bikes down a dirt road one summerafternoon. I was in the front of the pack and as we were tooling down the road, somehowwhen I went to ride over a branch, the branch ended up between the spokes of my bike.

I went sailing over the handlebars, landed on my hip and slid about 15 feet. I was only wearinga bathing suit at the time, so it was 15 feet of bare skin being dragged across dirt and gravel.

It didn't hurt as much as you might think and I got up and dusted myself off and climbed backon the bike for the ride back to my grandmother's house. We get about 5 minutes down theroad and my cousin Casey starts screaming and pointing at my leg. I looked down and mylower hip and all of my upper outer thigh was bloody.

We got to my grandmothers and she wasn't there so we continued riding up the road to myAunt Kitty's (yes, that is what we called her) and she spent the next 2 hours picking gravelout of my leg.

digitalrain:Marcintosh: sent home after not being able to stand the pain 30 some years ago, my friend still finds pieces of gravel in his bed in the morning 2 or 3 times a year left over from the motorcycle accident and the ER's Humanitarian, Cleaning With A Stainless Steel Brush.

He was hit by a golf ball and taken right off his bike. No helmet. He went down so hard I thought he'd had a stroke. Landed on his back and slid to a stop from 45-50 mph. Denim jacket. He was kinda whiney for a while.

Ew. Embedded gravel sucks.

When I was 15 or 16, my cousins and I were riding our bikes down a dirt road one summerafternoon. I was in the front of the pack and as we were tooling down the road, somehowwhen I went to ride over a branch, the branch ended up between the spokes of my bike.

I went sailing over the handlebars, landed on my hip and slid about 15 feet. I was only wearinga bathing suit at the time, so it was 15 feet of bare skin being dragged across dirt and gravel.

It didn't hurt as much as you might think and I got up and dusted myself off and climbed backon the bike for the ride back to my grandmother's house. We get about 5 minutes down theroad and my cousin Casey starts screaming and pointing at my leg. I looked down and mylower hip and all of my upper outer thigh was bloody.

We got to my grandmothers and she wasn't there so we continued riding up the road to myAunt Kitty's (yes, that is what we called her) and she spent the next 2 hours picking gravelout of my leg.

25 years later, I still have the scars.

Oh yeah. Scars are pretty durable. On both knees from falling off the J.C. Higgins.What kind of asphalt is it that has a surface of pebbles? In the tire path they get pushed into the substrate but on the sides where kids ride, Not so much. Stickly Drive in Rockville MD is where I left what felt like ten pounds of flesh off my knees. While JFK was on TV - couldn't get much attention for some reason 8-/

Back in 2001 I was in a car accident (guy ran a red, hit my driver's side door YAY!) they took a chest X-ray. And then a whole bunch of chest X-rays from different angles.(At least 6) I'm all like, wtf?Well it turns out I have some sort of metal BB or something in the rear half of my left chest cavity. No fresh wounds, so its not from the accident.Doc asked "Do you remember what that was from?" Nope, I said, "While I have brothers, they didn't have BB guns or anything."It is still in there somewhere. If I ever have an MRI I need to get a chest-X-ray first to make sure its gone./nscsb//nickname of shrapnel didn't stick///always 3 slashies

Hardly, the problem is how far north he is. It is hard to staff the isolated and lowly populated northern comunities as the doctors do not want to be there. They want to be in major population centers.

Except that's not what Obama is doing. What we are seeing here is what happens when you have a single-payer system. Obama is trying to get everyone covered, but *NOT* a single-payer system.

Esn:I've often found that most doctors go very much by-the-book, so if you have some sort of problem that their book says shouldn't be there, as far as they're concerned, it's NOT there. Sounds like that's what happened in this case.

I partially agree--if you don't fit their pigeonholes you'll have problems with the medical system.

However, this isn't a case of not fitting the pigeonholes. A blade being left behind in a stabbing is certainly within their normal events, the problem here is nobody checked when there was an ongoing problem, especially with setting off metal detectors. A biatchipped off on a bone won't set off a typical detector.

Stuff like this isn't that odd, except for the Dr. missing a damn knife blade.

I have glass that works to the surface on my right arm/side from going through a window 12 years ago, my dad had 00 pellets come to the surface every 2-3 years until I was out of HS. (served in Vietnam, he'd just say "well, that was another one of our guys getting a bit excited")

Marcintosh:digitalrain: Marcintosh: sent home after not being able to stand the pain 30 some years ago, my friend still finds pieces of gravel in his bed in the morning 2 or 3 times a year left over from the motorcycle accident and the ER's Humanitarian, Cleaning With A Stainless Steel Brush.

He was hit by a golf ball and taken right off his bike. No helmet. He went down so hard I thought he'd had a stroke. Landed on his back and slid to a stop from 45-50 mph. Denim jacket. He was kinda whiney for a while.

Ew. Embedded gravel sucks.

When I was 15 or 16, my cousins and I were riding our bikes down a dirt road one summerafternoon. I was in the front of the pack and as we were tooling down the road, somehowwhen I went to ride over a branch, the branch ended up between the spokes of my bike.

I went sailing over the handlebars, landed on my hip and slid about 15 feet. I was only wearinga bathing suit at the time, so it was 15 feet of bare skin being dragged across dirt and gravel.

It didn't hurt as much as you might think and I got up and dusted myself off and climbed backon the bike for the ride back to my grandmother's house. We get about 5 minutes down theroad and my cousin Casey starts screaming and pointing at my leg. I looked down and mylower hip and all of my upper outer thigh was bloody.

We got to my grandmothers and she wasn't there so we continued riding up the road to myAunt Kitty's (yes, that is what we called her) and she spent the next 2 hours picking gravelout of my leg.

25 years later, I still have the scars.

Oh yeah. Scars are pretty durable. On both knees from falling off the J.C. Higgins.What kind of asphalt is it that has a surface of pebbles? In the tire path they get pushed into the substrate but on the sides where kids ride, Not so much. Stickly Drive in Rockville MD is where I left what felt like ten pounds of flesh off my knees. While JFK was on TV - couldn't get much attention for some reason 8-/

Rockville? I grew up in Rockville! Graduated from Richard Montgomery High.

digitalrain:Marcintosh: digitalrain: Marcintosh: sent home after not being able to stand the pain 30 some years ago, my friend still finds pieces of gravel in his bed in the morning 2 or 3 times a year left over from the motorcycle accident and the ER's Humanitarian, Cleaning With A Stainless Steel Brush.

He was hit by a golf ball and taken right off his bike. No helmet. He went down so hard I thought he'd had a stroke. Landed on his back and slid to a stop from 45-50 mph. Denim jacket. He was kinda whiney for a while.

Ew. Embedded gravel sucks.

When I was 15 or 16, my cousins and I were riding our bikes down a dirt road one summerafternoon. I was in the front of the pack and as we were tooling down the road, somehowwhen I went to ride over a branch, the branch ended up between the spokes of my bike.

I went sailing over the handlebars, landed on my hip and slid about 15 feet. I was only wearinga bathing suit at the time, so it was 15 feet of bare skin being dragged across dirt and gravel.

It didn't hurt as much as you might think and I got up and dusted myself off and climbed backon the bike for the ride back to my grandmother's house. We get about 5 minutes down theroad and my cousin Casey starts screaming and pointing at my leg. I looked down and mylower hip and all of my upper outer thigh was bloody.

We got to my grandmothers and she wasn't there so we continued riding up the road to myAunt Kitty's (yes, that is what we called her) and she spent the next 2 hours picking gravelout of my leg.

25 years later, I still have the scars.

Oh yeah. Scars are pretty durable. On both knees from falling off the J.C. Higgins.What kind of asphalt is it that has a surface of pebbles? In the tire path they get pushed into the substrate but on the sides where kids ride, Not so much. Stickly Drive in Rockville MD is where I left what felt like ten pounds of flesh off my knees. While JFK was on TV - couldn't get much attention for some reason 8-/